BEN Franklin’s presence on Park Row is one of the last vestiges of Park Row’s former claim to fame as “Newspaper Row.” At one time, the New York Times, World, Sun, Journal and Tribune all were…

I don’t have the time or inclination to research it right now, but it can’t be a complete coincidence. Both Manhattan and Brooklyn’s Fulton Streets scythe through the downtown sections…

JAMAICA Estates, built on the northern edge of the former Town of Jamaica in the 1905-1907 period, occupies about 500 acres between Home Lawn Street, Hillside Avenue, 188th Street and…

I should have gotten a better photo of the Hotel Keller, West and Barrow Streets, back in 2021, but the rushing West Street traffic prevented me from positioning myself better.…

At the northwest corner of York Avenue and East 83rd Street is an unassuming 19th-century walkup with a realistic mural depicting a glockenspiel. Titled Glockenspiel, it honors the German community…

MUCH of the southern Bronx was owned in the colonial era by the Morris family. Richard Morris, originally from Wales, purchased a large estate called Broncksland from a Samuel Edsall…

MUCH of downtown Brooklyn has given up its rich collection of one-block and dead-end alleys, with a few notable exceptions, such as Grace Court, Grace Court Alley and even Harrison…

I have been thinking about the Interborough Express, a proposed mass transit line connecting Bay Ridge and Jackson Heights running mainly along the rights of way of the NY &…

No one is really celebrating it, but on the eve of the nation’s 249th anniversary, I’d like to mention another anniversary: the redrawing of the Brooklyn-Queens borderline separating present-day neighborhoods…

KNOWING the toll modernization was taking on the island, and perhaps presciently imagining the devastation to be wreaked on Staten Island’s old and out-of-the-way places by the opening of the…

BACK in March I walked sections of 4th and 5th Avenues in Sunset Park, an area I had neglected, at least on foot. I have traveled beneath 4th Avenue on…

THERE are many ancient ads for wholesale clothing concerns in the Garment District, Midtown between 5th and 8th Avenues, 29th to 41st Streets. Most of them are nonsdescript, with just…